eChurch Christian Blog

Cross-post by Joseph at the Rosh Pina Project:-

If you are a Christian in leadership, please copy and amend the following letter with your name, and email it to the Knesset Christian Allies Caucus at: christianalliescaucus@gmail.com.

Do also write to the Israeli embassy in your country.

Dear Sir,

We write to you as Christian leaders who are staunch supporters and friends of the state of Israel.

Our concerns surround the organization in Israel ‘Yad L’Achim’ which calls itself an “anti-missionary” organization. Over a prolonged period of time, Yad L’Achim has been actively hostile towards people who hold to beliefs which they consider heretical.

In November 2009, a man named Yaakov Teitel confessed to having murdered two Palestinian Arabs, attempted to murder a Messianic Jewish family, and deliberately wounded an Israeli professor. Yaakov Teitel placed a bomb in the home of a Messianic Jewish family, which resulted in serious injuries to the family’s teenage son Ami Ortiz. In particular, the case of Ami Ortiz has concerned many Evangelical Christians outside of Israel.

It has recently emerged that Yakov Teitel was actively involved in the Yad L’Achim organization over a 5 year period prior to his arrest. I would draw your attention to the recent petition from attorney Calev Myers of the Jerusalem Institute of Justice to the Attorney General of Israel, Mr Yehuda Weinstein. Myers’ letter regarding the Yad L’Achim organisation may be read online:

http://www.jij.org.il/articles/JIJ-AG%20Request_ENG_.pdf

The report shows that Yad L’Achim activists and leaders have consistently spouted propaganda against individuals and charitable organisations whose beliefs do not correspond to their own. Yad L’Achim has also been connected to actual cases of physical attack, as well as several cases of harassing and intimidating individuals and communities over a long period of time.

We would urge the Government of Israel to disband the Yad L’Achim organization so that both the quality of Israeli democracy and the freedom and security of all Israeli citizens may be improved. To disband Yad L’Achim, we believe, would be in-line with the interests of the state of Israel and of the wider international community.

Many thanks for your assistance. I hope to hear from you soon.

Yours faithfully,

There is a fair bit of online activity in response to a Sunday Telegraph article by Andrew Gilligan, claiming the Labour party has been “infiltrated” by Islamic extremists, in the form of Islamic Forum Europe (IFE).

This from the Spitoon

The Telegraph has published news of a six-month investigation which it undertook with Channel 4’s Dispatches on the Islamic Forum Europe (IFE). The IFE is a Jamaat-e-Islami entryist organisation which now commands a sizeable vote bloc and is physically located in the East London Mosque (ELM) with which it is closely linked. The chairman of ELM is Mohammed Abdul Bari, who is a former president of the IFE and is the current Secretary General of the Muslim Council of Britain.

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Obviously anti-Islamic websites are featuring this news heavily and repeating the Telegraph article verbatim.

Cranmer has a very insightful article on this one as usual:-

Andrew Gilligan is usually sound, so there is no immediate reason to dismiss his report in The Sunday Telegraph that the Labour Party have been ‘infiltrated by a fundamentalist Muslim group that wants to create an “Islamic social and political order” in Britain’.

He quotes the Environment Minister Jim Fitzpatrick, that the Islamic Forum of Europe (IFE) have become ‘a secret party within Labour and other political parties’. He says the group ‘believes in jihad and sharia law, and wants to turn Britain and Europe into an Islamic state’. In order to do this, it ‘has placed sympathisers in elected office and claims, correctly, to be able to achieve “mass mobilisation”’.

He appears to be oblivious to the fact that all Muslims ‘believe’ in jihad and sharia law: it is the duty of all Muslims to struggle for their faith and live a life in submission to the laws of Allah; it is what makes a Muslim a Muslim. But he appears to be incapable of distinguishing between the plethora of schools of thought on these theo-political concepts: one Muslim’s jihad and sharia are not another Muslim’s jihad and sharia: theological interpretation has been devolved and judicial authority protestantised.

This is not the first time Mr Fitzpatrick has incited ill-feeling towards his Muslim constituents: it was he who back in August ‘stormed out’ of a wedding reception when he refused to be separated from his wife.

And here he is now decrying a Muslim group for ‘acting almost as an entryist organisation, placing people within the political parties, recruiting members to those political parties, trying to get individuals selected and elected so they can exercise political influence and power, whether it’s at local government level or national level’.

‘Twas ever thus.

In a liberal representative democracy, it is the right of any legally-constituted group to order itself, get its members to join political parties, and then get them selected and elected ‘so they can exercise political influence and power’.

Good grief, even The Countryside Alliance are at it. And only a few weeks ago, an anonymous Conservative was decrying the same strategy of the Evangelical Christians.

Continure Reading

UPDATE: Harry’s Place have now covered this one:-

The Sunday Telegraph has published four articles about the Islamic Forum of Europe’s baleful influence on politics in East London.

The IFE is closely linked to Jamaat-e-Islami, a South Asian Islamist group. For a look into its thinking, see this speech last week by its leader Syed Munawar Hasan:

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Following the announcement about the “revamping” of the Richard Dawkins forum, which created a global wave of panic, alarm, anger and frightened responses from atheists, the New Humanist website revealed a sinister plot was a afoot.

The New Humanist’s discovered a Christian website called Christwire attributing the closure of the forums to the power of prayer; here’s what Christwire had to say:-

For years we warned atheists that we would take down their site entitled RichardDawkins.net, by the power prayer.

The atheists laughed and said prayer did not exist. They cursed us and said there was no God. I warned them time and again, and now, we see the true power of God as he has closed their sinful site, RichardDawkins.net.

This was the New Humanist response to these claims:-

So there you have it. And if you’re wondering why they hate Dawkins so, here it is:

“For those of you who do not know, Richard Dawkins is one of the worst offenders before God. He promotes bestial relations. He thinks that a “less evolved” human man and a monkey woman had sexual relations to create us.”A fairly accurate summary of The Selfish Gene, wouldn’t you say?

The laugh was on the New Humanists however, when they discovered the following about the website Christwire:-

Update: Okay, so it turns out the Christian website is a spoof (thanks Jared). Still funny though, and to be fair we’ve seen plenty of non-spoof evangelical statements even more ridiculous than that, so you can see how it got us!

Just shows even humanists can be wrong

On a more serious note, Matt Wardman over at the Online Journalism Blog, has written an excellent post looking at the coverage of the Dawkins forum “episode” in the Telegraph:-

Telegraph invents comparative degrees of atheism. Dawkins = “athiest”

Israel Today:-

Dozens of young Arab Muslims holed up in the Al Aqsa Mosque atop Jerusalem’s Temple Mount attacked visiting Jews and Christians with stones on Sunday morning.

Two Israeli police officers and at least 10 of the Muslim rioters were injured in the ensuing clash.

The riots then spread to Arab areas outside the Old City, where young Muslim stone-throwers attacked Israeli police and soldiers. Several arrests were made, but no more injuries were reported.

The violent demonstrations were believed to be in response to last week’s decision by the Israeli cabinet to add the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron and Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem to its list of national heritage sites. Both towns are under Palestinian control.

The decision to officially recognize the sites as sacred to Jews and improve their preservation as such has already resulted in widespread riots in Hebron and Bethlehem. The international community has also harshly condemned Israel’s decision.

An interesting and informative article in the National Post today looking at the controversy surrounding the move to canonize Pope Pius XII.

Is Pope Pius XII the The Nazi pope who facilitated Nazi aims, or is he the misunderstood and much maligned protector of the Jews, in a harrowing period of history? You decide:-

Holy Post:-

The road to sainthood is never speedy, but rarely is it as divisive as the campaign to canonize Pope Pius XII. Just last week, a group of prominent Catholic scholars urged Pope Benedict to slow down the process in order to better assess contradictory evidence. Some see the Pope, who reigned over the Roman Catholic Church during the Second World War, as a pro-Nazi collaborator and anti-Semite who went along with the Holocaust. To others, including some prominent Jews, he was an anti-Nazi, who actively saved Jews, risking his own safety and that of the Church in defence of the persecuted. To add to the complexity, many historians say Pius was neither a war criminal nor a saint, just a complicated individual caught in one of history’s most catastrophic conflicts. The National Post’s Charles Lewis looks at some of the leading theories in the complex case for and against the making of his road to sainthood.

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